Zero Tolerance for Immigration Nazis

The Atlantic's Article on Trumpian Family Separation Details What Every American Should Know.

Many, if not most, Americans bristle when comparisons get made between the U.S. and Nazi Germany. After all, we and our allies fought a world war to put a stop to the barbaric nature of that state.

The overuse of the pejorative word describing the ideological basis for that particular authoritarian state has weakened its impact, as it gets used by people with little to no idea of what it truly means. It’s right up there with “communist” these days as an adjective to describe people or policies the speaker most likely doesn't understand.   

Sadly, the ideological essence of those twentieth century defeated fascists lives on. Lately, I think it’s safe to say, fascism-lite has emerged from the shadows to gain a modicum of respectability in what were once considered conservative circles. 

A central tenet of last century’s fascist movements was sadism in pursuit of their goals. Those crimes against humanity succeeded to some degree because people refused to believe (or ignored) what was before their eyes.

If there’s one part of our deteriorating democracy that’s acquired the stank of yesteryear’s perversions of empathy, it’s the realm of those entrusted with protecting our borders. It’s not too late –but getting close– for decency to prevail regarding those humans who turn to the U.S. for economic and political security. 

Bad things have (and are) happening, and there is a distinct drift into a legal landscape devoid of the rule of law and the concepts of justice most of us take for granted. It’s based on the assumption of some people being inferior to others based on race and class. 

The first step toward stopping this erosion of our perceived values is to admit we have a problem…            

• In federal court cases, several parents whose children were taken away allege being taunted by agents who said “Happy Mother’s Day!” And parents say they were told that their children would be put up for adoption or that they would never see them again. Others recount being threatened or ignored when they asked where their children were. Perhaps to avoid physical altercations, some agents began deceiving families in order to lure them apart, or pulling children out of holding cells while they and their parents were asleep.--- The Secret History of Family Separation, Caitlin Dickerson, The Atlantic

I’ve long been a fan of reporter Jean Guerrero’s work. Her writing is as strong as it gets when it comes to conveying the emotional impact of the topic at hand without sounding squawky. The Los Angeles Times’ decision to hire her as a regular columnist strongly influenced my decision to become a subscriber.

Guerrero’s strength is her knowledge and perspective on the realities of the U.S.- Mexico border. Her first book, Crux: A Cross-Border Memoir, is an intensely personal account of growing up as a bi-national, intertwined with a search for self identity.

The strength of the writing in that book, plus a solid background on reporting on immigration issues, earned her the opportunity to pen a closeup view of Trumpian advisor Stephen Miller. Hatemonger is the astonishing biography of a man who dominated border policy through sheer force of will. 

The brutality of the past administration’s immigration enforcement policies and actions can largely be traced to this man’s drive to keep America pure (read white).

I wondered how Guerrero got some of her vignettes past the legal beagles at William Morrow; there’s some strong stuff in the book, the kind of material that would provoke a more thin-skinned politico into filing lawsuits galore.

It turns out that Miller is proud of his actions, and only regrets not being able to get more of his abominable agenda past the gatekeepers of what his ilk call the “deep state.” Truth is indeed the best defense against charges of libel or defamation.

How do I know this? I read Caitlin Dickerson’s 30,000 word (!) report on the Trump administration’s family separation program in this month's Atlantic.

It’s a thorough dissection of the inner workings of the decision making process concerning our Southern border. As many of us said at the height of this effort, the cruelty was the point. 

Dickerson tracked down enough ex-administration officials to establish Stephan Miller as the driving force behind both the public (theoretically legal) and unofficial (astonishingly illegal) application of force intended to deter illegal immigration and encourage tougher legislation.

• Trump-administration officials insisted for a whole year that family separations weren’t happening. Finally, in the spring of 2018, they announced the implementation of a separation policy with great fanfare—as if one had not already been under way for months. Then they declared that separating families was not the goal of the policy, but an unfortunate result of prosecuting parents who crossed the border illegally with their children. Yet a mountain of evidence shows that this is explicitly false: Separating children was not just a side effect, but the intent. Instead of working to reunify families after parents were prosecuted, officials worked to keep them apart for longer.

Despite years of evidence establishing that intensive border enforcement only pushed undocumented border crossings elsewhere, Miller and his cohorts thought the prospect of losing a child would be a policy capable of driving would-be migrants back to where they came from.

Or, more likely, in my opinion, was the enthusiasm they had for sadistic persecution of nonwhites as a means of keeping the motherland pure.

The Atlantic article reads like a prosecutor’s charging document. It’s chock full of testimony by participants in the process who went along to get along or (supposedly) thought what they were being asked to be a part of was so blatantly illegal/wrong that it would never come to fruition. 

It should surprise nobody that the Trump administration defended the use of family separation by claiming it was actually in the best interests of those affected.

• When the official Zero Tolerance policy went into effect, in the spring of 2018, the Trump administration made frequent use of this defense. I heard it again and again while I was conducting interviews for this story: Families were separated not to harm them but to keep others like them safe. What I never heard anyone acknowledge was that “deterrence” methods such as family separation have been shown to increase the likelihood of these terrible outcomes—because harsher enforcement induces children and families to try to sneak across the border using more dangerous methods, such as hiding in the back of a tractor trailer.

The oft-used notion that odious Trumpian programs were thwarted by the incompetence of the appointees asked to implement them is flipped when it comes to family separation.

It is clear that the aim was to use this method of border enforcement and work backwards to figure out the legal and logistical niceties.

• Again and again, Gene Hamilton ignored or rejected anything suggesting that the execution of a policy that separated children from their parents would create moral, legal, or logistical problems. When I asked a close colleague of Hamilton’s at the Justice Department why Hamilton was so persistent about moving the policy forward, she took a guess based on her own experience: “Stephen Miller told him to.” She added, “Stephen Miller often told people that if they tried to work through the system that they would get pushback … so it was really important for that person to just go around the system and do it themselves and circumvent the chain.”

• “For Stephen and Gene,” she told me, “anything that got stalled was evidence of the failure of the system,” not of any weakness in their policy ideas.

At least four thousand children were caught up in this scheme at one point, many of whom were shipped across the country with no way of contacting their parents, thanks to a non-existent paper trail.

Logistics? They didn’t need no stinkin’ logistics.

• On June 18, the fog of denial abruptly dissipated when ProPublica published leaked audio of separated children crying for their parents inside a government facility. It called into question the official assurances that separations were happening smoothly and humanely. More than that, it made clear that the targets of the Zero Tolerance policy were not criminals, but children.

• Throughout the seven-minute recording, a little boy speaking through a low, wobbly sob repeats “Papá, papá,” over and over. “I want to go with my aunt,” one little girl tells agents. Over their cries, a detention official can be heard joking with the children. “Tenemos una orquesta,” he said. “We have an orchestra—what we’re missing is a conductor.”

There are officially 700+ children separated from their parents during this program who have yet to be reunited. Record keeping was so poor that investigators haven’t been able to make the contacts enabling making families whole again.

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This article by Dickerson goes way overboard when it comes to “both siderism.” I appreciate the attention to detail; her failures come when the complete lack of a moral compass on the part of the people she’s writing about becomes overwhelming.

Yes, there are anecdotes about individuals wronged along the way. But too many of those obviously responsible for suffering escape culpability through weasel words.

This is what I think is the kind of Stockholm Syndrome that comes into play when it comes to reporters dealing with official sources who might be called upon for access to information in the future.  

***

Details, details.

Alex Azar, then-Secretary of Health and Human Services, the agency that housed separated children during Zero Tolerance and earlier local initiatives couldn’t be bothered with details of the programs his agency was mangling until such time as media accounts of the suffering surfaced. And then he was pissed, mostly because he hadn’t been consulted, not out of any concern for the welfare of those under his agency's care.

Racism and disregard for legal processes are presented as matters of fact. Former Acting deputy commissioner of Customs and Border Patrol, Ron Vitiello told Dickerson the main goal during Zero Tolerance was to encourage agents, whose morale was eroding. “This was supposed to be short-term pain for long-term gain,” Vitiello said. “I was trying to communicate with the workforce, telling them, ‘Hopefully we’ll see a dip in the numbers. This is going to work.’ ”

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials actively sought to prevent early efforts at family reunification once the horrors of Zero Tolerance/Family Separation were known to the public. You don’t have to be an expert at reading between the lines to realize that U.S. has thousands of people with badges and guns led by individuals who consider their job to be rounding up subhuman beings. A history of widespread sexual assaults by officers of these agencies and a lack of consequences gives testimony as to the underlying attitudes.

The number of migrant deaths reported in conjunction with border enforcement alone should give cause for concern. And the existence (until recently, maybe) of special Border Patrol units accused of covering up official wrongdoing tells me that these are people employed by our government with no concern beyond CYA when it comes to performing the tasks we should be expecting of them.   

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Critiques aside, what the Atlantic and Dickerson have accomplished here is a significant historical record.

Alas, the system is barely capable of prosecuting the leadership of the seditious mob that stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Or pursuing an honest investigation into the former-President who sat on his tax returns by lying about being audited for four years.

(At least we’re now getting the satisfaction of the Former Guy whining about the FBI executing search warrants at his Mar a Lago property. I’m sure his delusions about House Speaker Nancy Pelosi hiding in the bushes and laughing as agents cracked his safe will get worked into future MAGA rallies.)

What’s really scary about the Atlantic article is that the perpetrators of those inhuman (and should be criminal) actions consider their schemes to be unfinished business, just waiting for another nationalist autocrat to come along and implement: 

• People who know Miller say he believes that Zero Tolerance saved lives, and that immigration enforcement was Trump’s most popular accomplishment among his base. Miller has told them that the administration laid the groundwork necessary for a future president to implement harsh enforcement even more quickly and with greater reach than under Trump.

• In my interviews, the Hawks argued that Zero Tolerance had been effective—or that it would have been, if only it had been left in place a little longer—suggesting that if Trump or someone who shares his views on immigration were to be elected in 2024, family separations would almost definitely recommence.

Caitlin Dickerson’s piece deserves more attention from more than the people willing to wonk their way through 30,000 words. Read it if you get the chance.

Email me at WritetoDougPorter@Gmail.com     

Lead image: Collage based on Mural in downtown Las Vegas by British artist Izaac Zevalking.